The price of dissent

Ten years ago this week the world watched in horror as the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. But what happened after the camera crews left? John Gittings tracks the fortunes of four individuals who dared to defy Beijing

Mon 31 May 1999 12.47 EDT
First published on Mon 31 May 1999 12.47 EDT

Wang Weilin, the young man who stopped the tanks in Tiananmen Square, has disappeared from sight, though not from history. China's president Jiang Zemin said the police had checked morgues, prisons and computer registers, but were unable to find any trace of him.

Weilin, if that is his real name, may have been the lucky one that got away. Hundreds of others students, musicians, teachers, engineers, farmers, shopkeepers and civil servants have been less fortunate. Their tales are pathetic, heroic, tragic or bizarre, but they rarely get told. How many people inside or outside China have even heard of the Egg-throwers of Tiananmen Square?

The time was May 23, 1989, 10 days before the massacre began. The target was the huge portrait of Mao Zedong. The eggs, begged off an itinerant pancake-seller, were filled with paint and ink. Yu Dongyue and two comrades had travelled from Hunan Mao Zedong's home province to make their protest against the Communist Party's "feudal rule". Within an hour, a reserve portrait had been hoisted to replace the splattered one.

The students in the square, believing that the three were agents provocateurs , seized them and handed them over to the police. It was a terrible mistake, for their brief gesture of defiance was judged to be an act of "counter-revolutionary sabotage". Yu and his two companions are now serving sentences of 20, 19 and 16 years in a squalid Hunan jail. All have spent time in solitary confinement, described by a former prisoner as "just over two square metres in area [with] no ventilation or heating . . . and almost pitch-dark".

The egg-throwers are on Amnesty International's recently published list of more than 240 people jailed in 1989 who are still in prison or on medical parole. It is said to be a "mere fraction" of the real number. Others have been jailed since then for staging protests or trying to gather news about the "disappeared". Some of those now in prison did commit acts of violence against the army as it stormed into central Beijing. But many simply made speeches, put up posters, or wrote pamphlets. Their sentences range from 10 years to life.

The well-known dissidents feature on much shorter lists handed in by foreign leaders visiting Beijing. (Cynical diplomats say it keeps the human rights lobby quiet at home). From time to time China earns diplomatic credit by releasing a big name.

But the small names do not feature on any diplomatic list. Their fate makes a mockery of the confidential assurances from Beijing officials, offered across dining tables, that things are getting better. The same officials argue that "most people in China have never heard of the dissidents". How could it be otherwise, when their cases go unreported and even relatives often cannot find out where they are held?

When the Chinese media does publish information, it is to make a point. Last December, Qin Yongmin was one of three dissidents jailed for more than 10 years (he was given 12) for trying to set up a China Democracy Party. Their sentences sent a harsh signal to other dissenters that the "Beijing thaw" of 1998 was over. Never mind Bill Clinton's famous TV debate on democracy with President Jiang Zemin: the clampdown on dissidents had begun.

Qin belongs to an incredibly brave group of protestors who have known the horrors of Chinese jails and still offer themselves up for more punishment. Their struggle for democracy began in 1979, not 1989. Qin had already served seven years for putting up posters on Beijing's short-lived Democracy Wall. They know from first-hand what it is like to be brutalised by prison trusties, or be driven half-mad by solitary confinement, or to lose hair and teeth from poor diet, or to be tormented by the lack of family news.

Before going back inside, Qin wrote a detailed account of the regime in a detention camp in Wuhan where he spent nearly two years. With dates and names, he chronicled regular beatings which left prisoners crippled; and incidences of prisoners who were denied medicines unless they paid; the dying were sent home to keep the statistics low. At least in the regular prisons, says Qin, prisoners only get beaten after breaking the rules, not before.

Official China says there are no political prisoners: everyone has been sentenced "according to law". This does not account for those sent to the detention camps by "administrative decision" without a trial. Nor can it justify laws which stigmatise peaceful political protest. The crime of "counter-revolution" has now been abolished as part of a much-heralded "modernisation" of the Chinese legal system. There is no amnesty for those already convicted under it, like the egg-throwers.

Most Chinese students today have other priorities: learning computer skills, getting good jobs, winning scholarships abroad. Given the chance, they might not even fill the square again. But the authorities are playing safe. The entire area has been fenced off for "refurbishment". Tiananmen Square is what the Chinese call "a problem left over from history". Sooner or later the record will be put straight, but probably not until the current generation of Chinese leaders has handed over power.

The argument over how China should evolve politically is complex; there are fierce divisions over it among dissidents abroad. None of this helps the unknown prisoners who remain inside. And the young man whom history will always remember for stopping the tanks, creating perhaps this century's most powerful image of peaceful protest? "He didn't get shot," said Premier Zhu Rongji when asked about it recently, missing the point entirely.

The optimistic view is that Wang Weilin's friends whisked him to anonymous safety, where he remains to this day. There is a darker theory that he was picked up soon afterwards and executed or jailed for life. But Beijing will never, ever, dare to admit to that.

'They sentenced me to 18 years in jail for blocking the traffic' - Chen Lantao

Marine biologist Chen Lantoa, born in 1963, was sentenced to 18 years in Qingdao, eastern China, for "counter-revolutionary incitement and disturbing traffic order". "I was just 25 years old," Chen wrote to Amnesty, "full of vigour to get started in life, when this ill fortune struck me. I would make up for lost time if I get the chance to regain my freedom.

"The only reason I have been jailed for 18 years is that I was frank and outspoken about the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square. My defence counsel was going to argue that I had no counter-revolutionary aims . . . to my great distress, the court did not allow him to defend me from the basis of my innocence."

Ten years ago, Chen went out on the streets of Qingdao, outraged by the news from Beijing. He did not commit any act of violence and the main charges against him were based on his speeches: his only other alleged crime was to "block the traffic" when listeners crowded around. Chen said the government had "incited the troops to open fire on the people", and that "tanks and armoured cars rolled around Tiananmen Square, hitting everything". Most people would regard these assertions as statements of truth. Chen's real offence was to make his speeches at a bus terminal and outside the gates of two factories. On Qingdao University campus, he might have got off more lightly.

But "inciting the workers" is a crime which both enraged and terrified the aged leaders in Beijing. Many believe it was the presence of workers, as well as students, in Tiananmen Square which provoked them to send in the tanks. Chen also suffered because local authorities were keen to impress Beijing. He says that the city court had intended to give him a seven-year sentence: it was the province that insisted on 18 years.

Chen's father has recently appealed for his release on medical grounds. He claims his son is suffering from arthritis, hair loss, severe stomach and skin ailments. "He never wanted to overthrow the Communist Party," his mother Shen Peihua wrote, in an appeal to the authorities. "His speeches were mainly expressing a critical opinion about corruption, bureaucracy and other wrongdoings of certain Party cadres."

His wife Sun Lijun was arrested and held for 50 days simply because she was connected to him. She was pregnant at the time. "I have had a lot of difficulties bringing up our child on my own," she said in her appeal. "I hope they can just release him now."

Chen is only due to leave prison in June 2002 when his son, whom he has hardly seen, will be 13. Before his arrest he and his wife had studied English and planned to apply for scholarships abroad. Now he says he will do anything if he is released even beg in the streets: "The main thing is to get out of here as soon as possible."

'I made a list and got charged with prying into high-level state secrets' - Li Hai

Collecting lists is a dangerous occupation in China. Li Hai spent four years gathering data on more than 800 people punished in the post-Beijing massacre crackdown. In 1995 he was accused of "hooliganism" and put in a detention camp. In 1996 the student, born in 1955, was sentenced to nine years in Beijing's Liangxiang prison for "prying into high-level state secrets".

During the recent National People's Congress in Beijing, his mother issued an appeal: her son, she said, was suffering abuse in prison and had been denied family visits and medical treatment. Li had gone from family to family throughout Beijing collecting information, giving comfort where he could and organising financial help for those in trouble. He focused on the unknowns, says Human Rights in China, the organisation which now champions his case.

He documented the fate of those who received harsher treatment "because they had no connections with the outside world". These included workers, peasants and Beijing citizens demonstrating in support of the students in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese government publishes no lists of prisoners and only rarely releases a scrap of information, even to families, about individual cases. Li was therefore guilty of "prying into and gathering information" about those sentenced in 1989.

He had dared to collect data on "names, age, family situation, crime, length of sentence, location of imprisonment, treatment while imprisoned". All of these, according to the court verdict, were "high-level state secrets". Li had already spent six months in jail after putting up posters on the Beijing University campus. A graduate student in philosophy, he was unable to resume his studies or find a job after being released in 1990. Li also helped launch the "Peace Charter" of 1993, supported petitions and signed letters calling for the release of prisoners.

At the other end of China, an unemployed musician called Chen Meng was also jailed in 1995 for acquiring another list. He had obtained an official blacklist of Chinese dissidents abroad. It set out who should be excluded from China, and who should be seized. Chen faxed the list to Hong Kong and was accused of "leaking state secrets". Now serving a 12 year sentence in Dongguan jail, Chen is also in poor health.

'What is the difference between mental patients and normal people?' - Wang Wanxing

"Dear Deng Xiaoping," wrote Wang in a banner he tried to unfurl on the eve of the third anniversary of the Beijing massacre, "you have done me an injustice. For you I endured the prisons of Mao Zedong and [his successor] Hua Guofeng. I lost my job because of this . . . Compensate me 10,000 renminbi (£8,300) for financial and spiritual losses."

Wang, born in 1952, raised his banner in the wrong place and on the wrong day. Plain-clothes police dragged him away, and film taken by foreign TV crews was confiscated. He has remained since then in Ankang Psychiatric Hospital, Beijing, which has links with the police, fed with tranquillizers which he says make him dizzy and confused. Relatives say he has never been mentally ill.

"What is the difference between a 'mental patient' and normal people?" he asked in a letter three years ago. "Is it persistence? Conscientiousness? Impracticality? If we cannot integrate kindness and righteousness, what sort of world will this be?"

Wang wrote a dozen letters to Deng Xiaoping before and after the massacre. These may be rambling but do not justify detention. He criticised the Communist Party leadership for allowing a minority to get rich; he also criticised the student leaders in Tiananmen Square.

Last October he smuggled out another letter from hospital, appealing to be released under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which China had just signed. Mental hospitals have often been used to confine awkward characters whose behaviour may be politically incorrect. A Chinese textbook on criminal investigation, published for the police, lists "writing reactionary letters or posters" among symptoms of mental illness.

'Though we friends were beaten our arms are still linked' - Ngawang Sangdrol This stocky Tibetan nun was a young teenager when first arrested by Chinese security police. Sent to Drapchi prison in Lhasa for three years in 1992 after a peaceful pro-independence protest, she has refused to "repent". Her sentence for "counter-revolutionary propaganda" has twice been increased to a total of 18 years, the longest served by a Tibetan woman prisoner. The first time was for tape-recording nationalist songs, with 13 fellow nuns, and smuggling them out of jail. The second time was for protesting at China's rigged election of a new Panchen Lama (Tibet's second-ranking religious leader).

A former prisoner says that in 1996 Ngawang, born in 1977, was held in solitary confinement with no windows or light for two months, on a diet of one bun a day. Last year three EU ambassadors paid a disastrous visit to Drapchi. They were not allowed to see Ngawang and the governor refused to answer questions about her or any other case.

Unofficial reports said that prisoners had protested before the visit; several were shot. A month later five nuns were found dead in their cells "suicide", according to the Chinese. Ngawang is known as a fighter, a new recruit to Tibet's tradition of militant nuns. "She is the only person who has consistently been a ring-leader of prison protests," says the London-based Tibet Information Network, which monitors her case. She may have been moved to a stricter regime in a new high-security detention centre. Events in Tibet in 1988-89 should have acted as an early warning signal for Tiananmen Square. Demonstrators were shot down and martial law was declared though it was not shown on CNN.

Tibetans say the militant nuns are "tougher than the monks". In quiet whispers, friends and relatives seek out foreign visitors to retell stories of appalling treatment. Allegations of torture have included the use of dogs and lighted cigarettes, being stripped naked, and sexual assault with electric batons. On the banned tape, Ngawang and her comrades say they have "no regrets" about being in prison, although they will "never forget the horrible tortures". In a touching song, they sing of a better future . . .

Looking out from Drapchi Prison, there is nothing to see but sky. I wish that the clouds floating there were my parents. Though we captured friends were beaten our arms are still linked. The beautiful cloud in the east is not a sewn patch on the sky. The time will come when the sun appears from behind it. We are not sad, because the moon will follow the day.